Erinç Seymen'in kişisel sergisi; Mayıs 2005 [ENG & TUR]

Technologies of Otherness

It seems like the ideological modulations that shape the geography we are sharing remain comfortably intact: the painful proximity between the social and the state, the heavy body of the army that can constantly refresh itself, an ultra-modernism imposed from the top, and the reactions to it that could be only formulated through conservative codifications. This frozen structure had kept different sorts of social conflict fresh and around mid-nineties, it forced the society to the point of explosion. Yet, some sudden occurrences brought in a relative relaxation in the late nineties. The reactionary forces came to power one after the other, first the ultra-nationalist, then the muslim-conservatives and they had to shift into a consensual procedure with the other bodies that shared the power. The obvious tools of repression, violence and rough control were ceased for a moment and a concurrence was successfully formulated between the dynamics of conservatism and the mechanisms of capital and spectacle. Today a left-critical position has to work on a multifaceted project of resistance and change, since different ideological mechanisms that originate from separate historical periods seem well to operate simultaneously and without a conflict.

In some art projects that I contributed to, I tried to define the Istanbul experience through the perspective of my own generation. These projects were composed of the constellations of people whose formation years were exposed to the closures of the 1980 coup d’état but they had been previously fed by the organic life of the seventies and the hegemony of the socialist left in cultural terms. They were able to transform this critical heritage, perhaps not directly into political formations, but into the field of cultural practice. The easy application of the notion of generation has its own traps, I am aware of them –yet, sometimes it can be a useful tool to contextualise. Unfortunately, this tool doesn’t help me much in understanding of what comes after my generation. I feel deprived of the ways to see through the works of the young people, who are now in their twenties, born directly into the grey years of the eighties –and the argumentations based on clichés and the notion of ‘lack’ would obviously sound nonsensical here. The works of Erinç Seymen, whose comradeship had an effect on me, and I suppose visa versa, sometimes entice me to play with typology sketches on this younger generation, but sometimes he confuses my mind with his exceptional and anomalous positioning.

Seymen’s works operate through a series of ‘technologies of otherness’ as Sue Golding formulated it. Primarily, we can talk about ‘curiosity’. One feels the presence of the eyes that designed these works, insisting projective eyes that become organs with phallic functions. It is a gaze that observes, that doesn’t shun of being gazed at, that observes itself (its own act of gazing); a voyeuristic and consequently an exhibitionist gaze, that looks for the potentially disturbing elements, things that have labelled as abject, and forces them to surface.

At this point a second technology intervenes: ‘cruelty’. Seymen transfers the Barthesian punctum onto the painterly field; he designs affects that hit, pierce and hurt the audience, that produce ‘allergic reactions’ in their minds. Beside the apparent edgyness within the figurations of his paintings, this urge to hurt surfaces most clearly in his painting installation exhibited in the group show I’m too Sad to Kill You! (autumn of 2003) which also included a chair covered with long construction nails.

The formal qualities of Seymen’s paintings aim to reinforce and pronounce this punctum-effect. Photographic images, analogue or digital, or stills taken from the moving images are processed digitally into patterns and then applied manually onto the canvas. The techniques employed within this procedure supplies the desired sharpness on the figurations: details that can distract are being filtered; shapes are simplified to the most basic elements of visual signification; large colour fields are being employed; and cold and pastel hues are preferred to flashy colours lest the force of the psychological effect in the figuration gets diluted. This strategic set of reduction, abstraction and erasure of the painterly traces, has an objective that operates towards the opposite direction; through aggressive motifs they aim at causing a metaphoric bleeding in the minds of the audience. In Seymen’s early paintings this urge to aggression targeted the two-dimensionality of the canvases; in some instances, we see the surface being opened up as a bruise; or in others, we see organic ejaculations off the surface producing abject-effects.

Another technology of otherness employed in Seymen’s works seems to be ‘contamination’. In his paintings exhibited in Under the Beach: Pavement (winter of 2003) again in Proje4L and in some compositions included in his first solo exhibition Uncanny Distance (autumn of 2003) in Galerist, personal experience, primarily sexual ones, was used as the pronounced constitutive element –such as pleasure, ecstasy, pain, shock... Some of the works were informed or implied to be self-portraits; in some cases, as in the series of The New Genitals, the emphasis is on a certain part or organ of a singular body –there’s an overall autistic occupation inherent in these works. A particular piece, in which two separate self-portraits are being tied with a sticky organic substance by the skulls, was entitled after ‘symbiosis’, a term that defines the interaction between two or more adjacent but distinct organisms. The implication in the painting and its title, on one hand, reproduces the preoccupation with the sense of the self, but on the other hand, it marks the fracture being opened in the body of the so-called undividable unit of the ‘individual’.

From that moment onwards, a series of ‘leakages of intimacy’ emerges. If we look retrospectively to the Uncanny Distance exhibition, we detect how elements of collectivity, entering through that split, did enrich the overall content. As the initial target, the institution of family, the most immediate collective to a person, is being harshly criticised as the first environment in which the power is produced and corrupted. The composition named Trio depicts the classic triangle of father-mother-child after the happy family cliché as championed in advertisement aesthetics; yet, in addition to the reductions of colour and detail as mentioned above, the eyes of the faces are deleted from the surface (or rather retained unpainted) and what remains is a couple of scarily grinning countenances.

After the family structure Seymen extends his critical perspective onto a larger social scale and he literally politicises his work and critique: signifiers attached to adorations of power, fascist and military iconographies, destructions of war on the urban texture are set at the fore or background. Yet, instead of a total execration on the notion of power and ideology, Seymen looks at the momentary ways in which the public interest in these notions are being appropriated by Batailleian rituals and sexual games, and points at the permeable borders between the affirmative force and paranoiac power –motifs on homosocialty, queer and S&M cultures become visible.

Two works of the artists produced in between his two solo exhibitions, that are realised by visual media other than painting, touch the paradoxical and tense relationship between the private space of the person and socialty. In the untitled video piece, we see a half naked, blindfolded young male figure, with tied hands. He is being fed by force by another male figure whose face is covered with an S&M style mask. Despite his restricted, emasculated and enslaved state, he doesn’t resist to the masked man; a state of agreement, or even a compassion, seems to function between them. The composition appears first to be a direct illustration of the masochistic game on the preset and voluntary roles between the master and the slave; yet, it also touches the problematic relationship between the person and the society, and in extension between the person and the state; and it underlines the technologies of conformism and internalisation rather then an easy conception of a negative ideology imposed from above.

The guy with the S&M mask reappears in the photograph installation of Outsider exhibited in Along the Gates of the Urban (spring and summer of 2004) with a different role; this time he is not the one possessing social power but he is in the position of the marginalised, as the title tells us. In the cinematographically running images, he moves within the quotidian flux of the city of Istanbul and strolls the streets in an aimless drift. Contrasting with the queerness and aimed horror in his outlook, he doesn’t seem to irritate or bother the people around him. Seymen’s piece marks the defeat of a persona designed to displace the general moral conservatism by another stifling barrier: the ‘civic ignorance’, as Zygmunt Bauman named it. No matter by which type of conservatism it is regulated, the megalopolitan life imposes a disinterest and alienation between people under the package of civic manners; and within an atmosphere like this, a person claiming to produce a difference is being sentenced to isolation and omission. The powers that homogenise the society inflict constantly ‘natural norms’ on the ‘provocation’ of the different, yet at the same time, they don’t refrain from constructing cool immunity systems against emerging differences.

Another photography installation by Seymen, Boys Club exhibited in Visitor (autumn 2004) is comprised of pictures taken from the balcony of the flat the artist lives in. The series produced within a year and a half is fixed onto the street corner across. It exemplifies the two contiguous interests in the artist’s work. First, what is observed is the ways in which young men emerging out of adolescent years with a testosterone filled energy spatially appropriate the public space and codify the street by their gender. Beside this socio-critical curiosity, the gaze on the boys also expresses a homoerotic voyeurism without much hesitation.

The cohabitation between the desire defined by the sense of the self and the desire to observe a collectivity and join it is also manifest in Seymen’s second solo exhibition, Violation Exercises. The painting entitled Miracle, for example, resumes the emphasis on the reflection on the self, whereas another piece like Riot that depicts an uprising crowd rushing in a torn building exemplifies the artist’s interest in pure politicality. The slight shift from the organic to the cultural is also observable in this exhibition. In place of the foam-like protrusions on the surface of early paintings, we find literalising effects that pronounce the two-dimensionality of the canvas, such as representational elements taken from the popular imagery like Mr Smiley, graffiti, logos, pornography and so on. The selfhood enacted by ways of figuration can now be replaced by a word with a slavicised, that is othered, spelling of ‘Erinć’. A couple of themes in the first solo exhibition are recycled here, such as non-normative sexual practices, violent nature of power claiming entities, fetish objects… In addition to these, humorous transgressions on the recently emerged sensitivities of moral conservatism, homophobia and the institution of religion come forth, and the female presence, which was veiled in the first exhibition by a man-to-man atmosphere, becomes now visible.

The biting character of the punctum effects in Seymen’s works faces a serious problem that is difficult to solve. What kind of resistance can be employed in relation to the presentation of his works that are mostly exhibited in sterile and elitist settings, which can easily transform them into marketable goods? In order to avoid the separation of the paintings from each other as individual objects of contemplation, Seymen sets out to construct ‘atmospheres’; he applies an ambient colour onto the walls, he employs a scenario that would allow conversation between the works, and he applies to another technology of otherness, that is, ‘noise’. For both of the exhibitions he has designed an audial ground of samples and electronica effects. This atmospheric aura, aimed at filling the gallery space with a sense of unity, enfolds through low beats and rhythmic harmonies; yet, it also produces strategic resonances that would discomfort the audience by a psychological tension.

The technologies of otherness employed by Seymen do not claim a niche of otherness that would be formulated and categorised by mechanisms of signification. Just to the contrary, they resist a total definition; they demand a widespread, unmarked and unbounded expansion. Additionally, they keep their critical singularities away from the illusions of individuation, and enter into alliances with fleeting yet intensive modes of togetherness.

Ötekilik Teknolojileri

Paylaştığımız coğrafyadaki toplumsal dokuya biçim veren ideolojik tonlamalar fazla değişmeksizin yerli yerinde duruyorlar sanki: toplum ile devlet arasındaki mesafesizlik, ordunun kendini sürekli yeniden meşrulaştırabilen iri cüssesi, tepeden inme bir ultra-modernizm ve buna ancak muhafazakâr kodlamalar aracılığıyla gösterebilen tepkiler. Farklı türdeki gerilimleri sıcak tutagelen ve doksanlı yılların ortalarında ısıttığı kazanı patlama noktasına doğru iten bu yapı, doksanlı yılların sonlarındaki bir dizi ani gelişmenin sonucunda yerini görece bir rahatlama ortamına bırakmıştı. Tepkici damarlardan önce milliyetçiliğin, sonra da müslüman-muhafazakârlığın bir şekilde iktidara taşınmış olması, zorunlu olarak diğer iktidar odaklarıyla bir uzlaşıma girmelerini gerektirmişti. Baskı, şiddet ve kaba denetime bağlı refleksler dinlenmeye alınırken, muhafazakârlaştırma dinamikleri ile kapital ve gösteri mekanizma arasında bir uyuşum formülü tutturulmuştu. Sol-eleştirel bir konumun bugünlerde çok yönlü bir direnme ve değiştirme projesi üzerinde çalışması gerekiyor, çünkü daha önce farklı dönemlere özgü görünen ideolojik aygıtlar bugün eşzamanlı ve sorunsuz biçimde işleyebiliyorlar, pekalâ.

Yapımına katkıda bulunduğum bir kaç projede İstanbul’u kendi kuşağım üzerinden tanımlamaya girişmiştim. Formasyon süreçleri 12 Eylül’ün yarattığı kapanmalara maruz kalmış da olsa, çocuk yaşta yetmişli yılların organik yaşamından, solun kültürel anlamdaki hegemonik ağırlığından beslenmiş ve bu miras sayesinde geliştirebildikleri eleştirel perspektifleri doğrudan siyasal hareketlere olmasa da, kültürel üretim alanına tahvil edebilmiş insanlardan oluşuyordu bu projelerde biraraya gelen konstelasyonlar –biraz da kendini tanımlama çabasıydı tabii ki girişilen. Kuşak çözümlemelerinin kurduğu tuzaklardan haberim var, ama bağlamsallaştırma namına bazen işe yarayan bir gereç olabiliyor kuşak nosyonu. Ne var ki, kendi kuşağımdan sonrasını görmek konusunda çok yardımcı olmuyor bu gereç bana. 12 Eylül’ün içine doğmuş ve şu an yirmili yaşlardaki genç insanların üretimlerini nasıl okumak gerektiğini kestiremiyorum –klişeleşmiş ve eksiklik üzerinden tanımlanmış argümanların da sakıncaları açık. Yakın bir dostlukla, şekil aldığım ve verdiğim Erinç Seymen’in üretimleri, bu kuşağa dair bir tipoloji geliştirmeye kışkırtıyor beni kimi zaman; kimi zaman da bir anomali, bir istisnaya dönüşerek zihnimi karıştırıyor.

Seymen’in çalışmaları bir dizi ‘ötekilik teknolojisi’ (Sue Golding’in terimiyle) ile birlikte işlerlik kazanıyor. Öncellikle ‘merak’ unsuru sözkonusu. Yapıtları tasarlayan gözün inatla dışa doğru bir hamle yaptığı, fallik bir organa dönüştüğü hissediliyor. Gözleyen, ama aynı zamanda gözlenmekten gocunmayan, kendini (gözlerken) gözleyen bir bakış bu; dikizleyen ve teşhir eden; rahatsız edici bulunduğu ve iğrenç olarak damgalandığı için gözden uzak tutulanı arayan ve yüzeye taşıyan…

İkinci bir teknoloji olarak ‘zalimlik’ giriyor işin içine. Seymen, Barthes’ın fotoğrafik ‘punctum’unu resimsel düzleme taşıyor; izleyiciye çarpan, batan, onu yaralamaya girişen ve en azından onda ‘alerjik bir reaksiyon’ üretmeye çalışan etki unsurları tasarlıyor -resimlerdeki keskin figürasyonların yanında, Proje4L’deki Seni Öldüreceğim İçin Üzgünüm sergisinde (sonbahar 2003) duvarlardaki resimlerinin önüne yerleştirdiği çivilerle kaplı sandalye tasarımında doğrudan açığa vurulduğu gibi.

Seymen’in resimlerindeki biçimsel dil, bu punctum etkisini desteklemek, öne çıkarmak üzerine kurulu. Analog ya da dijital fotoğrafik imgeler, ya da hareket eden görüntülerden alınan dondurulmuş kareler ilk aşamada teknolojik yöntemlerle şablonlara, ikinci aşama da el çalışmasıyla tuval üzerine geçiriliyor. Bu süreç dahilinde uygulanan eksiltme teknikleri tuval üzerindeki figürasyonlara sağlanmak istenen çarpma etkisini veriyor: dikkati dağıtabilecek ayrıntılar ayıklanıyor, şekiller temel anlamlandırma koordinatlarına çekilene dek basitleştiriliyor, geniş renk düzlemleri kullanılıyor, ve sözkonusu etkinin üzerini örtmemesi için çarpıcı renkler yerine soğuk, pastel renk seçimlerine gidiliyor. Soğuklaştırma, soyutlama ve ressama ve eline ait fenomenolojik izlerin silinmesine yönelik bu stratejik tercih, aslında tam tersi yönde işleyen bir amacın peşinden koşuyor; resmedilen ve agresyon içerebilen temalar aracılığıyla izleyinin zihninde eğretisel bir kanamaya yol açmaktır bu. Ama sanatçının özellikle ilk dönem resimlerinde agresyonun tuvalin iki boyutluluğuna da sıçradığı görülüyor: kimi zaman tuval yüzeyinin de bir yara gibi açıldığı örnekler var Seymen’in resimleri arasında; ya da belirli bir iğrenti etkisi yaratmak üzere organik püskürmelerin tuvallerden taştığına tanık oluyoruz.

Seymen’in çalışmalarında bir diğer teknoloji olarak ‘sirayet’ öne çıkıyor. Sanatçının yine Proje4L’de, Plajın Altında Kaldırım Taşları sergisinde (2003 kışı) gösterdiği tuvallerde ve Galerist’teki ilk kişisel sergisi Tekinsiz Mesafe’de sergilediği kimi kompozisyonlarında kişisel deneyimle (haz, esrime, acı, şok vs.) çerçevelendirilebilecek cinsel ağırlıklı örgelerin öne çıktığı görülüyor. Kimi çalışmaların otoportre olduğu söyleniyor ya da sez(dir)iliyor; kimisinde, Yeni Jenitalya, serisinde olduğu gibi belirsiz ama tekil bir bedenin ayrıştırılmış bir organına vurgu yapılıyor –otistik bir meşguliyet göze çarpıyor bu tür çalışmalarda. Sanatçının iki ayrı otoportresinin yapışkan bir dokuyla kafataslarından birbirine yapıştıkları komposizyonun başlığı için, bitişik bir yaşam içinde farklılıklarını koruyan organizmalar arasındaki etkileşimi tanımlayan ‘simbiyoz’ sözcüğü seçilmiş. Sanatçının kendi benliğine, ya da genel anlamda benlik nosyonuna olan ilgisi burada bir yandan yeniden üretilirken, bir yandan da bölünmez bir ünite (individuum) olarak tasavvur edilen ‘birey’ kavramı dahilinde yaşanan yarılmaya da işaret ediliyor.

Bu noktadan itibaren ‘mahremiyet sızıntıları’ başlıyor. Tekinsiz Mesafe’ye geri dönüp baktığımızda serginin, bu yarıktan içeri giren kolektivite unsurlarını işleyen yapıtlarla zenginleştirildiğini görüyoruz. İlk adımda, kişinin en yakınındaki birliktelik olan aile yapısı, yine burkan bir sertlikle, erkin belki de ilk üretildiği ve yozlaştığı ortam olarak tanımlanarak eleştiriye tabi tutuluyor. Trio isimli kompoziyonda reklâm estetiği içinde mutlu aile pozunu yansıtan bir anne-baba-çocuk üçlüsü görülüyor ama daha önce bahsettiğim renk ve detay eksiltmelerine ek olarak, yüzeyden silinen (daha doğrusu yüzeye aktarılmayan) gözler aracılığıyla, karşımızdaki gülümseyen yüzler ürküntü veren suretlere dönüşüyor.

Aile kurumunun ardından Seymen eleştirel perspektifini toplumsal ölçeğe yayıyor ve, sözcüğün klasik kullanımıyla, üretimini ve eleştirisini ‘siyasal’laştırıyor: erk tapınmalarına dair göstergeler, faşist ya da militer ikonografi, savaşın kentsel doku üzerinde yarattığı yıkımlar fonda ya da önplanda kompozisyonlara yerleşiyor. Sanatçı yine de, iktidar ve erk nosyonlarını tümden lanetleyen bir konum yerine, bu nosyonlara duyulan toplu ilginin Bataille’cı anlamda ritüellere ve cinsel oyunlara dönüştüğü anlara bakma, olumlayıcı güç ve paranoyak erk arasındaki geçişken ve ikircikli sınırlara dikkat çekme yoluna gidiyor –homososyallik, queer ve S&M kültürüne dair motifler belirginleşiyor.

Seymen’in iki kişisel sergisi arasında gerçekleştirdiği ve resim dışındaki görsel malzemelere başvurduğu iki ayrı çalışması, kişiye ait özel alan ile toplumsallılk arasındaki, benzer bir ikirciliğe sahip, gerilimli ilişkiye değiniyor. Başlık konmayan video çalışmasında, gözleri ve elleri bağlanmış, çıplak bir erkek figürünün, S&M maskesi giymiş bir başkası tarafından zorla beslendiği görülüyor. Esirleştirilmiş ve edilgenleştirilmiş konumdaki figür kısıtlanmış durumuna rağmen fazla direniş göstermiyor; ortada bir anlaşma olduğu seziliyor; kompozisyon, mazoşizmin üzerine anlaşılmış, gönüllü köle-efendi rolleri üzerine kurulu oyununu görselleştiriyor olsa da, kişi ile toplum, ve bunun uzantısı olarak kişi ile devlet arasındaki hem gerilimli hem uyuşumlu ilişkiyi de eğretiliyor; ilişkinin tek taraflı, tepeden dayatılan bir şekilde kurulmadığına, içselleştirme teknolojilerine dayandığına işaret ediyor.

S&M maskeli figür, Kentin Kapıları Boyunca (2004 baharı ve yazı) sergisinde gösterilen Outsider başlıklı çalışmada başka bir rolle karşımıza çıkıyor: bu kez erki elinde tutan değil, marjinalize edilmiş olan konumda. Gündelik Istanbul deneyimi içinde toplumsal alan içinde hareket ediyor. Sinematografik bir akış içerisinde gösterilen slayt fotoğraflar, başlığın bize toplum dışında bırakıldığını söylediği figürün kent içinde işsiz güçsüz biçimde sürüklenmesini anlatılıyor. Görünümündeki tuhaflığa ve belki amaçladığı ürkünçlüğe rağmen doğrusu etrafınca pek de yadırganmadığına tanık oluyoruz. Seymen’in çalışması, ahlâki muhafazakârlığı rahatsız edeceği ve kışkırtacağı düşünülen bir personanın başka bir boğucu bariyer tarafından ezilmesine işaret ediyor: Zygmunt Bauman’ın terimiyle ‘sivil dikkatsizlik’. Ne tür muhafazakârlıklar tarafından regüle ediliyor olsun, megalopoliten yaşam içinde insanlar arasında oluş(turul)an kayıtsızlığa, sivillik kisvesi altındaki yabancılaşmaya koşut olarak, dışarıdanlık talebinde bulunan, ötekilik üretmeye girişen kişinin önemsizleştirilmesi ve yalnızlaştırılması gözler önüne seriliyor. Toplumu homojenleştiren kuvvetler bir yandan herhangi bir ‘fark’ın ‘provokasyon’una karşı hassas olduklarını doğal bir normuşcasına dayatmaya çalışırken, bir yandan bu tür kışkırtmalara karşı güçlü bağışıklık sistemleri geliştirmekten geri durmuyor.

Bir buçuk seneye yayılan bir süre içinde Seymen’in kendi apartman dairesinden, karşıda kalan sokak köşesini görüntülediği çok sayıdaki fotoğraftan oluşmuş Boys Everyday başlıklı çalışması (Ziyaretçi sergisi, sonbahar 2004) sanatçının yapıtlarını belirleyen iki ana ilginin bitişikliğini örnekliyor. Ergenlik dönemini henüz aşmış, testosteron yüklü genç erkeklerin kamusal alan üzerinde mekân edinme, sokağı kendi toplumsal cinsiyetleriyle işaretleme pratikleri siyasal bir merakla gözlenmleniyor. Diğer yandan, gençlere yöneltilmiş bakış, kişisel bir homoerotik dikizleme edimi içeridiğini de fazla çekinmeden ele veriyor.

Benlikle tanımlanan arzu ve bu benliğin geniş birlikteliklere bakma ve katılma arzusu Seymen’in İhlâl Alıştırmaları başlıklı ikinci kişisel sergisinde de mevcut. Mucize isimli tuval sanatçının ilk dönemlerde vurgulu olan, benliğin kendine dönen bakışını sürdüren bir çalışma olarak göze çarparken, coşkulu bir kalabalığın yarık bir binanın içine akışını resmeden Ayaklanma ise saf bir siyasallık ilgisini dışa vuruyor. Aslında organik olandan kültürel olana doğru gelişen hafif kayış sanatçının bu sergisinde de gözlemlenebiliyor. Daha önceki dönemde öne çıkan tuvalin üzerindeki tuhaf doku öbekleri yerine, bu sergide popüler imgelemden alınmış temsili unsurlarla (Mr Smiley, pornografi, graffiti, logo, vs.) tuvalin iki boyutluluğuna ağırlık veriliyor. Daha önce figürasyonlarla tanımlanan benlik, bu kez slavlaştırılmış (ötekileştirilmiş) bir yazımla bir kelimeye, Erinć’e dönüşebiliyor. İlk sergideki kimi temalar, yeniden ele alınıyor: norm-dışı cinsel pratikler, erk talebinde bulunan kimi unsurların şiddet içeren doğaları, fetiş niteliği taşıyan nesneler... Bunun yanında, son dönemde belirginlik kazanan kimi muhafazakâr ahlâki duyarlıklar, homofobi ve genel olarak din kurumuna dair ironik dokundurmalar beliriyor ve daha önceki kişisel sergideki erkek-erkekliğin ötesinde kadın motifi görünürlük kazanıyor.

Çalışmalara yüklenen keskin etkilerin karşısında çözümü zor bir problem var. Çoğu zaman steril ve elitist bir ortamda sunulan, ve araçsallaştırıcı bir algılamayla kolaylıkla pazarlanabilir nesnelere dönüştürülebilecek olan bu çalışmaların sunumuna hangi türden bir direnç boyutu katılabilir? Seymen, tuvallerinin beyaz bir küp içinde birbirinden ayrı kontemplasyon objeleri olarak ayrıştırılmasının önüne geçmek için ‘atmosfer’ inşaatine girişiyor; tuvalleri, sergilendikleri odacıklarda birbirlerine ulanmalarına izin verecek anlam kurgularına göre yerleştiriyor; ve bir diğer ötekilik teknolojisine, ‘gürültü’ye yer veriyor. Her iki kişisel sergisinde de sanatçı, çeşitli sample’lar ve elektronika efektleriyle birlikte oluşturduğu işitsel bir zemin kurguluyor. Sergi mekânının tümüne yayılan, kurduğu atmosferik aurayla bir bütünlük oluşturan, ayrışık duran tuvalleri birbirine bağlayan bu zemin, düşük vuruş ve ritmik ahenk üzerinden ilerliyor olsa da, izleyiciyi sergi mekânında rahat bırakmayan, onun üzerinde psikolojik bir gerilim yaratacak ses nitelikleri üzerine yaslanıyor.

Seymen’in başvurduğu ötekilik teknolojileri kategorize edilebilecek, anlamlandırma mekanizmaları tarafından formüle edilebilecek bir ötekilik haznesi talep etmiyor. Tam tersine, tanımlanmaya direnen, dizginlerini koparmaya uğraşan bir alan genişliğine hitap ediyor. Ama bu süreçteki eleştirel tekilliğini ayrışık birey yanılsamasından uzak tutarak, anlık, uçuşkan ama yoğunluğu olan birlikteliklerle bağlaştırıyor, ittifağa sokuyor.

9B [ENG]

[Geçtiğimiz İstanbul Bienali üzerine yazdığım ve Frieze dergisinin Kasım 2005 sayısında yayınlanan metin]

Much has been said about the way biennials began to spring up in ‘peripheral’ places in the 1980s, serving to whitewash the politically problematic recent pasts of the respective host countries. The Istanbul Biennial, established in 1987, was certainly a case in point; yet a genuine willingness to reform and enliven a cultural atmosphere burdened with the legacy of the merciless coup d’état of 1980 was clearly present in the early stages. The Istanbul Biennial is part of the occasional activities organized by IKSV (Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts), set up by the Eczacibasis, a bourgeois family with social democratic leanings, whose desire to bolster the image of ‘the bright face of Turkey’ has intermittently overlapped with the interests of a new intelligentsia seeking to break free from 100 years of solitude, localism and introversion and to integrate with contemporary global culture.

The third biennial, in 1992, curated by Vasif Kortun and the fourth one, in 1995, curated by René Block, strove to relate the event directly to its geographical and historical context, trying to reflect on the newly emerging creativity in the surrounding countries after the collapse of state communism. Both exhibitions were in keeping with the trend in the 1990s for politicized art content, and both were highly beneficial in introducing this part of the world to the global art circuit in more detail.

The biennial of 1997, curated by Rosa Martinez, marked a visible shift in the agenda of the event. With the emphasis on the curators’ personal preferences and choices came a certain detachment from the local context. As a result, Istanbul began to be portrayed in an isolated, even narcissistic way, romanticized and aestheticized as a site of passion, beauty and otherness. This perspective chimed in with the local desire to promote the city as a major tourist attraction. The rapid growth of the Turkish economy between 1994 and 1997, and the increased self-confidence that went with it, meant the city needed to be marketed in a new way, and a new ideology sprang up that emphasized the city’s exoticism. At that point IKSV also abandoned any sense of criticality and started to operate virtually as an alternative ministry of tourism and culture, seeking above all to send a positive image of Turkey to Europe. Instead of the social, cultural and urban problems of an exploding megalopolis, it was the city’s historical profile, and the physical silhouettes of the domes and minarets, the melancholic seascape of the Bosporus and all the accompanying clichés, that were brought centre-stage.

Two years ago curator Dan Cameron tried to correct this romanticized image by injecting a set of documentary-style video works that dealt directly with political issues – the title of the show, ‘Poetic Justice’, was indicative of a more balanced approach. Yet the remarkably poor use of the majestic interior of Hagia Sophia as one of the exhibition venues clearly indicated that there was a need for self-criticism within the biennial structure itself. Inviting Charles Esche and Vasif Kortun to curate the ninth biennial was seen as heralding a more sober approach. Esche has been a leading figure in the re-politicization of contemporary art practice in Europe, and Kortun had already produced a wide-ranging criticism of the previous biennials. Their programme included major structural changes: instead of using historical sites that appealed only to tourists, the biennial would put itself right at the heart of the urban flux. The project would extend beyond the two months of actual exhibitions and be supported by a series of talks and other events. Also the number of invited artists would be decreased, in order to keep to a budget that would allow them to spend more time in the city and to relate to the intricacies of the urban texture rather than relying on surface impressions. Guided tours, weekly supplements in a local newspaper and other media would be used to reach a larger audience. Moreover, the biennial would concentrate on the city itself, striving for alternatives to the dominant, competing ideologies of rampant neo-liberal gentrification on the one hand and suicidal nationalist isolation on the other.

Two different types of city-related exhibitions held last year were seen as models to avoid. The first was exemplified by the two scandalous exhibitions held in Germany, ‘Call Me Istanbul Is My Name’, at ZKM in Karlsruhe, and ‘Urban Realities, Focus Istanbul’, at the Walther Gropius-Bau in Berlin, both of which inherited the representational approach typical of other exhibitions about the Balkans that toured Europe in 2003, and pushed neo-Orientalism to the limit. The other show to have a cautionary effect on this year’s Istanbul Biennial seemed to be the last Berlin Biennial, which was heavily criticized for its over-literal, over-intellectual view of the city of Berlin itself. Trying to distance themselves from representational and over-analytical takes on the city of Istanbul, Esche and Kortun successfully combined restraint with a genuinely artistic sensibility.

Nevertheless, to my surprise, humour and emotion were privileged over direct political references: confrontational and activist positions were pushed into the side-projects in the ‘Hospitality Zone’; analytical urban approaches were confined to the seminars preceding the exhibition; hope for social change was articulated in the biennial reader and the critical debates took place in the weekly newspaper inserts. The main exhibition itself was somewhat muted and lacked bite; it didn’t challenge the centrality of Istiklal culture (the city’s axis for shopping and night life, between the Karaköy and Taksim districts), and, while distancing itself from the imperial Golden Age, it partially subscribed to the melancholy romance of another historical period which has been eclipsed by nationalist ideology of the last century: the rich, cosmopolitan and decadent age of Istanbul at the fin de siècle and early 20th century.

Considering the way the city’s newly founded museums and institutions are tending to create an aestheticized, sterile and banal local art scene, one suspects that the reforms offered by Esche and Kortun will prove to be only temporary. Perhaps this show is about as political as it is possible for the Istanbul Biennial to get. It’s certainly time to ponder daring alternative structures.

National Identity and Social Engagement [ENG]

The Problematic of National Identity and Social Engagement in the Contemporary Art Practice in the Balkans

[Bükreş kentinde bana dört ay kalma fırsatı veren New Europe College'a 2004 Şubat'ında verdiğim makale. Kaba bir yapıya sahip olsa da üzerinde çalıştığım doktora tezimin omurgasını oluşturuyor.]


Within a relatively short span of time, three major exhibitions based on the contemporary art practices from the Balkan geography has been organised in three cites of two German speaking countries, Austria and Germany. Besides gathering together examples of recent art practices, these events set out to offer a portrayal of the Balkan culture as a whole, with or without an irony. The titles attached to these representational framings give sufficient clue about the external perspective of the three well-known paternal figures of the European curatorship: In Search for Balkania (Peter Weibel with the collaborations of Eda Cufer and Roger Conover in Graz), Blood and Honey, Future’s in the Balkans (Harald Szeeman in Vienna) and In the Gorges of the Balkans, a Report (Rene Block in Kassel).

The trilogy has preceded by a series of extensive exhibitions covering the art production in geographies successively defined as Central Europe, East Europe and South East Europe and it can be seen as a further consequence of the increasing Western interest in the cultural dynamics released after the fall of the state socialism and the expansion of EU eastwards. The peculiar coincidence in timing of these events has raised suspicions about what the institutional and ideological motivations behind them might be. The search for the new hype in the art world has already lingered over a series of geographies considered as peripheral to the central nodes of the Western art system such as Glasgow, Scandinavia, China and Latin America.

The basic argument launched against these three art events by the critics from the framed geographies, is based on the argument that they do operate in line with the expansionist logic of the capital in retrieving new markets and labour force , and further as a postcolonial continuation of cultural colonialism through which cultural differences of some ‘exotic’ regions is to be brought forth. This latter argument seems to be in accordance with the recent academic studies on ‘Balkanism’, which elaborates the legacy of Edward Said’s groundbreaking Orientalism within the specificity of the never properly defined geography of the Balkans.

A rightly put objection for the representational character of these large-scale exhibitions is that they are only endorsing a certain type of visual production, works that respond, directly or not, to their local contexts, and that can be read mainly by some attached knowledge in the specificity of these contexts. Artworks that are merely based on the epistemology of the new visual media or the pure reflection on the institutional character of art have been excluded in favour of works that deal with social phenomena, traumas, political and cultural conflicts, asymmetries in power, urban problematics and so on. In fact, that sort of “ethnographic paradigm” has been the dominating tendency in the field of visual arts globally; yet even inclined to work thematically within specified social contexts, a large amount of artists invited to these shows feel indisposed by being reduced to the status of a context translator, an illustrator of cultural difference who reflects and reinterprets the paradigms and stereotypes of the cultural milieu s/he works in.

In addition, there is also the suspicion that this sort of exhibitions reflects “the displaced utopian and critical desires of the critics and curators in the centres they cannot find in their immediate surroundings “the centre’s longing for some kind of political specificity in the art coming from ‘out there’”. And is it not connected to the need of social democrat or third-way governments of Europe to “deal with the local, multicultural politicisation around immigrant communities”? (Kortun and Medina, 2003)

However, a shorthand equation between the historical construction of the Balkans from the Western European perspective and the scenarios and the motivations of the aforementioned exhibitions falls short of explaining the whole setting and remains reductive. To a certain extent, there is a danger here of reproducing the object of critique, that is homogenising a diverse set of cultural formations, and construing a fetishised Occidental entity, which will merely stick onto the historic, binary antagonism devised between Europe and non-Europe, (or in the context of the Balkans, ‘not-yet-Europe’). Besides, we have to bear in mind that what differentiates the ideology of Balkanism from historical Orientalism is that it “also functions as a mechanism of domination within the Balkan countries themselves”. (Močnik, 2002)

To step beyond the unproductive limits of constant complaining and self-victimisation, there is a need to pursue the newly emerged energies and modes of subjectivities as consequence of these recent geography-framing events. Retaining the critical distance to the representational character of these events we, artists, curators and critics could not resist to participate in them. On the basic level, they have offered the urge and material facilitation to produce works that are otherwise difficult to realise and exhibit at home. They have helped to build contacts to the art intelligentsia and audience in central geographies, which in the future will hopefully lead to the accession to non-representational collaborations.

A more serious gain however is the transversal conversation that has been attained between neighbouring art scenes of the region. As the location of these gatherings is slightly shifting from the central institutions of the Western Europe to the local art spaces of the East European/Balkan region, a new potential for theoretical speculation is emerging that would work on the convergences and divergences between the productions of the artists and their contexts –within a relational model of difference rather than binary structures of otherness.

The paralysing lack of a communication between the art scenes of the Balkans region prior to the transition phase after 1989 was engendered by the isolationist consequences of a century long nationalism as much as the complexities of Cold War politics. For this reason, most encounters between the contexts lead to lengthy explanations on the selves that have been largely shaped and conditioned by national histories. In the geographically framed exhibitions the artists and artworks are rarely exposed to national partitions, yet the catalogue texts gather these pieces scattered into the exhibit space back into their national context.

This paper commences with a paralysing paradox: it will pursue the conventional mode of categorisation of national contexts, but at the same attempt to look at the strategies by which the notion of national identity has been challenged, interrupted or subverted by the contemporary art practice in the Balkans. The use of the transversal links on the discursive ground of the recently enhanced conversation between the scenes, the heterogeneities between the generations within the countries and the differences between the cities of the same country are to be employed here strategically as a device to sidestep the reproduction of myths behind the national organisms.

(Counter-/Dis-/Non-/Over-) Identification

Two conventional methodologies of resistance to the power and authority have been the ‘inversion’ of the existing power relations in favour of the unprivileged segments of the society (exemplified by the struggle for constituting a state based on proletarian interests) and the ‘subversion’ of the whole power structure to overthrow the hierarchy altogether (defended by the anarchist theory in its classical phase). A Nieztschean critique on both of these radical strategies was based on the argument that “one cannot merely oppose authority by affirming its opposite: this is react to and, thus, affirm the domination one is supposedly resisting”. (Newman, 2001)

First half of the twentieth century witnessed a series of unorthodox reformisms within Marxism, developed by young Lukács, Korsch, Benjamin, Frankfurt school, and so on. One of the main figures of this group of thinkers was Henri Lefebvre, who tried to introduce the Nietzschean critique of Hegelian dialectics into Marxist theory. He forged a ‘thirding’ element into the binary logic of dialectics, a strategic position to open it up to the expanding field of alterity. This ‘trialectics’ aimed to attain a counterposed assemblage of multiple terms (symbolically starting with three), which are mutually dependent and relativise each other.

Having collaborated with Lefebvre for a while, the members of the Situationist International introduced the technique of détournement, the reuse of pre-existing artistic elements in new ensembles. For them, within the circulating plethora of signifiers in a world run by spectacle, there wasn’t a need for an absolute break and transgression to build up an ‘outside’ territory external to the system. A critical approach run by a subjective position would then appropriate the cultural products of the spectacle and modify them with subtle changes in meaning.

The structuralist objection on this subjective position opened up an extensive debate on the issue of self-formation, on the dilemma between agency and structure, between political engagement and anti-foundationalism, between metaphysics of an autonomous subject and dissolution of the subject into the language/discourse/inherited social codifications. After a long stalemate, one of the most prominent critics of the essential understandings of the self, human nature and anthropocentricism, Michel Foucault tried to sidestep the suffocating closure of the omnipotent discourse:

…We must make allowance for the complex and unstable process whereby discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling-block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy. Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it. (Foucault, 1980)

The flexibility of moving within the discourse and playing with its inherent conflicts has been further elaborated by Judith Butler, the leading theoretician of performative theory. She proposed that, “although the subject is a cultural construction, a product of a prior signifying process, it is capable of resignification, of rewriting the script” (Butler, 1995). Any identity has to be performed continuously through citation and repetition of its signifiers; but each performance of identity opens a minute but crucial space of resignification in being disloyal to the signifier of that identity. This tiny bit of divergence in the ‘citational chain’ opens up a possibility of politicising performance. The task is to look at what escapes…

Elaborating on Butler’s investment in the notion of performance, Jose Esteban Muñoz develops the definition of the term ‘disidentification’. For him, the strategy of the ‘counteridentification’, the conventional strategy of resisting the symbolic system of ideology, does not only fail to overthrow the hegemony of the dominant discourses but it also reifies the bifurcating dialectic it has sought to undo, through its appeal to a “controlled symmetry of counterdetermination.” Disidentification, on the other hand, “works on and against dominant ideology”, and “transform[s] a cultural logic within” (Muñoz, 1999). Against the frontal struggles of inverting or subverting the hierarchies dominating the social field, it approached to the idea of ‘conversing’ the structure of these hierarchies:

The process of disidentification scrambles and reconstructs the encoded message of a cultural text in a fashion that both exposes the encoded massage’s universalising and exclusionary machinations and recircuits its working to account for, include, and empower minority identities and identifications. Thus, disidentification is step further than cracking open the code of the majority; it proceeds to use this code as raw material for representing a disempowered politics or positionality that has been rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture. (Muñoz, 1999)

Although clearly prioritised throughout the book, Muñoz concedes from the start that “disidentification is not always an adequate strategy of resistance or survival for all minority subjects; at times, resistance needs to be pronounced and direct.” In the following pages of the book, he does not refer back to the moments, in which disidentification remain a less effective and preferable tool than its fellow strategy counteridentification, and he does not specify the nature of the occasions for ‘direct’ resistance. Moments of crises, trauma and urgency, perhaps, which would not allow much time for cultivating a critical stance from the perpetual but slow attainments of the performative?

Muñoz’ problematisation of the notion of identification seems mainly to operate between the majoritarian hegemony of values and a pluralistic series of minoritarian resistance. Yet, there may be instances in which the process of identification between the individual and the collective identity fails without referencing a minoritarian alterity –a displacement without the need for another space. How would someone, for example, can experience a distantiation from his/her family; or from his/her national identity -supposedly given by nature- if s/he is not an apparent member of another national identity or of a minor ethnicity within the boundaries of that nation state? In that case, should we call this a process of ‘non-identification’?

This paper set out to speculate about the ways in which contemporary artist elaborate the notion of national identity in varying attitudes. Besides the two aforementioned strategies, I will also refer to the notions of ‘non-identification’ and ‘over-identification’. The former strategy can operate either critically, a strategic expulsion of the representational in art, or non-critically, as a disinterest in social engagement and loss of interest in anyhting political. Over-identification on the other hand works strategically, by appropriating the properties of the criticised ideology and pushing them to the limits of grotesque.

The Zone of Tension

The works of Sokol Beqiri, an artist based in Peja, Kosova, convey a stark contrasts between some mundane elements appropriated from the everyday life and entertainment industry, and some shocking, tragic or violent records taken from the ‘real life’. The artist has successfully combined luxuriously floating signifiers of the spectacle with disturbing scenes exemplifying the darker side of the human kind. Excerpts from a Milka advertisement, for instance, are fused with images of successive butchery of several cows; or, scenes from an advertisement with animated chicken running in the streets of Broadway, while Lisa Minelli is cheerfully singing “New York New York” at the background, are contrasted with scenes in which Beqiri axes the heads of a number of chicken in his backyard and leaving them flutter blindly to their death; a Western TV programme for kids filled with happily hopping figures of some alien puppets is being interrupted by extracts from an interview made with the artist himself in which he emotionally collapses and cries while trying to explain what producing art meant in a war-ridden Kosova. The latter interventions of Beqiri strategically irritate the audience and leave a sharp Verfremdungseffekt on the vanity of the former visual productions. This opposition also works metaphorically for underlining the asymmetry between the Western lives under safety and non-Western ones under constant threat of danger.

The artist employs the same edgy comment in his project End of Expressionism (Painted by a Madman). On the surface one can misjudge the two types of photographic images used in the composition as purely aesthetic elaborations; on the one hand some semi-abstract figurations and on the other the angelic look of a young boy lying contemplatively on a river’s shallow ground, his hairs floating lyrically in the stream. However, there is a tragedy hidden in these pictures: the former photographs document totally burnt human bodies wrapped in red blankets and a close inspection onto the picture of the boy in water becomes aware that his neck is broken and his body is lifeless. The immediate aestheticism on the surface is undone by the bitter content; artistic conventions are dismounted by the sheer tragedy of the artist’s social surrounding. Vaguely marked by a specified geography (that is the Balkans), Beqiri does nonetheless carefully avoid revealing the national or ethnical identity of the victims in these compositions.

The same generic quality is also present in his piece with the title When Angels Are Late (2001). On a panel we see an average, traditional painting from the Western art history with the religious theme of Abraham’s sacrifice of his son being interrupted by an angel descending from the heavens. Coming close the panel we discover a peephole in the middle of the painting, through which we see a very short, grainy and looped shoot of an unbearably shocking scene: a man lying on the ground, his head is pressed down with a military boot and his throat is being slit with a sword. Again the identity of the victim is mindfully avoided, the source of the documentary material is not revealed. Yet, there is a possibility to trace what the signification in the title is meant to be: when angels come too late… Being aware of the autobiographic information that Beqiri and whole his family were deported during the recent Kosova war, one can somehow link the title to the NATO intervention during the conflict -although the analogy between the Western troops and the figure of angel remains ironic.

Another work of Sokol Beqiri depicts seven persons in a row, sequenced from the oldest to youngest, holding Albanian flags in both of their hands and performing navy flag signs in different positions. The people in the picture, in fact the members of the artists family, seem to be in a joyous mood and celebration. The flag signs also hint at the arrival of some military troops and through the use of Albanian flag, one comes to the induction that the flag performance refers to the arriving of some Western convoys to Kosova –and most probably in a welcoming manner, as expected from them. Yet, realising the meaning of the sentence the people in the picture produce with their gestures the audience experiences a displacement: as it reads “FUCK YOU”. Edi Muka (2001) reads this work as follows:

[C]aught in between nationalism on one side and international dullness regarding the status of his people on the other, the artist is addressing both sides with a coded alphabet and smiling faces. It’s a call to everyone’s consciousness, as to how difficult it can be to understand each other if the walls of hatred and the sets of preconditions are not erased from people’s mind.

True that Beqiri bases his works on the vast platform between comfort and terror leaving the content open to interpretation, and it is also true that he mostly succeeds to reveal his traumatic experience without falling into the traps of various essentialism. Fuck You (2001), nevertheless, falls short in terms of displacing the appropriated image of the national icon and the related rhetoric shadow of nationalism. I am not very certain whether the discrepancy between the smiling faces in the picture and the provoking sentence they construct do play against each other.

In most of his earlier works characterised by their instinctively anthropologist approach, Erzen Shkololli, an artist also from Peja, grappled with the tension between traditional rituals, ceremonies and objects of his culture and the contemporary symbolic values imposed on them (Muka, 2001). The slightly readable political subtext in these works became the constitutive trait of Shkololli’s later production, in which he foregrounds the issue of identity in contemporary Kosova. In the Transition triptych (2001) a fragmented subjectivity between different sorts of identities is exemplified by three different, juxtaposed real life portraits of the artist himself: a picture taken during his circumcision ceremony, a studio photograph depicting him as a young pioneer and a recent passport photograph with the twelve stars of the EU in the background. Clad with adequate formal codifications, Shkololli’s body becomes the shifting surface on which Muslim faith, communist ideology and the construction of a new European identity try to hold.

The issue of national identity has been elaborated by the artist in two different works. In Hey You (2002) we see Skurte Fejza, a well-known Albanian folk singer, performing a song in her traditional costume. The lyrics start with an interpellation directed towards Europe:

Hey Europe / Hey Europe I’m addressing you a letter / As Albanian of Old Albania / How are my sons / You know well that they’re in emigration / Hey You grey-haired Europe / Do You remember my territories? / Do You remember Albanians in one homeland? / Why didn’t You consult the papers that You’ve in London? / How did you cut off our borders! / My brothers and sisters were left outside / My nephews and nieces they’re left behind / You have divided the Eagle’s sons in two parts / … / I’m pledging You for the God’s sake / Make them united , the George Castriota’s sons / That you’ve divided them long ago / We’ve never stopped crying/ At the end of this letter I’m writing / Don’t play the with the Albanians / If they break Eagle’s wing / Oh the whole Balkan will burn.

During the eighties Fejza was persecuted by the official authorities for the intensive nationalist agenda in her lyrics. The song she performs in Shkololli’s piece has again a contemporary political agenda in reproaching Europe for preventing the unity of a Great Albania and causing suffering and further risk in the Balkans. The striking convergence of the traditional values and actual politics is the leading dynamic in this piece, as it was in the artist’s earlier works of Shkololli. But, what about the lyrics? Should the artist not have distantiated himself from the immediate discourse inherent in the song, through an estrangement effect, an irony or whatever? Does the shining background on which Fejza was placed really mark her isolation, her inability to make her voice heard, as Shkololli argues? Or does it rather accentuate the contours of a national identity that is already full present on her traditional outfit?

Shkololli doesn’t subscribe to essentialist politics, without doubt. His other piece on the subject Albanian Flag on the Moon pursued an explicit strategy of ironising the representational character of national tropes: the image of a cosmonaut thrusting an Albanian flag into the soil of the moon is strategically grotesque, for sure. But in the case of Hey You has the content not been left without a trace of some distance or irony, which could short-circuit the process of identification? Can a radical pose function without a visible mark of criticality? Does my argument here impose a standardised principle of political correctness on the singularities of different geographies? Can the national identity of a country that is heavily under construction afford a certain sense of patriotism and identification with a representational ‘We’? Does the evaluation of national identity differ between the oppressor and the oppressed, cultures in safety and cultures in agony? Does a criticism launched against Europe (which can paradoxically tolerate this reproach with a masochistic ease)’ or West in general, open up a space for national identification in a new anti-imperialist gesture? Would we not run again the risk of occidentalising Europe?

In the year 2003, the project Balkan Konsulat organised by >rotor< gallery from Graz hosted a series of exhibitions based on of the cities of Southeast of Europe. Along the main events, the guest curators were asked to choose two artworks to be exhibited on one of the billboards placed in the city, which would then be later published in the Austrian daily newspaper der Standard and travel to other contributing cities. Stevan Vuković, the curator of the Belgrade exhibition invited Dejan Grba, and his work, The Deceased – Archive.

This archival image was actually preceded by a series of work titled The Deceased comprising photographs, in the artist description, “of (mostly younger) people who perform a scene of their own imagined death as if it would have happened in this period of their life.” Referring to Roland Barthes’ use of a photograph a young man sentenced to death and waiting for his execution, and to a general human tragedy by facing the death, the images in the series bore nevertheless the traces of a situated, locally specific fear of death in the young imaginations that have severely suffered from an irrationally bloody decade during the collapse of Yugoslavia. More than being about death, these performative enactments of one’s own death (or rather murder), in a relatively younger age, was aimed to pursue an intimate understanding of daily politics of being alive.

The Deceased – Archive designed to complement this previous series was actually operating with a methodology that was opposite to the previous photographs. This time the scene of death was based on archival material that unavoidably called back the notion of truth. The historical photograph employed here originated from the period of World War II. The depicted image is a corpse of a young boy lying on a table with his severed head placed besides his innocent body. A basic digital intervention of Grba was transferring the severed head back onto the decapitated torso, reconstituting the wholeness of the body, and bringing it back to life –yet by retaining also the severed head, that is the trauma, the horror, the visual affect in its place. In his concept description Grba made it clear that he was aware of the “potentially disturbing nature” of the work, and he invited the viewer to step beyond contextualising the image and to “overcome the possible (and quite probable) unease” through an appeal to “self-introspection”. However, there were some people who found the image disturbing and who were not in favour of dis-contextualising it. Der Standard stated that they would not publish the image on their papers, and the partner of the exhibition series in Sarajevo said that they would not display it on a billboard in their city.

The objection of der Standard was probably related to their disinclination to bring haunting images of a horror experienced somewhere close by to the well-protected, family-based, social democrat households of their readers. But, the discomfort of the associates in Sarajevo was undoubtedly related to the direct, specific and deeply traumatic experience of the siege and terror inflicted on their city, rather than a generic visual disturbance by displaying human agony, disintegrated human bodies and so on. It was a statement about Sarajevo’s unpreparedness for being treated by a process of abreaction. The correct time to deal with that trauma will be decided by the city itself, they implied; -perhaps an unspoken suggestion whispered: and not by an artist coming from Serbia.

Was Grba’s plea for the audience inhabiting the public space not to over-contextualise his piece (that is, not to contextualise it through the overwhelming signifier of the country he originates from) bound to fail from the start? Should he have been more attentive to the extremely delicate fragilities of the region by pursuing a politically correct reservedness? Wasn’t there a danger of echoing the ideological rhetoric of the Milosević regime that constantly construed Serbians as the initial victims of the disintegration process of Yugoslavia and the following wave of ethnical cleansing and massacres? Should Grba have remained rather within the restrained, speechless posture of ‘shame’, which is something completely different than the sense of ‘guilt’? But, what about the trauma of the masses that are reductively clustered under the name of the oppressing state apparatus, the trauma of the victims of the Milosević regime within Serbia, of a generation that had to witness the demise of its own youth? In that circumstances, can we afford to ask for a "pre-conscious self-censorship, a way of obscuring a world that could no longer be presented in comprehensible terms?”

How far can we identify the content of an artwork with the burden of its historical references, and the artist with his/her national identity? To what extent can an artist distantiate or divorce him/herself from his/her national identity, and by which strategies? These are complex issues toward questioning to develop a creative strategy, which interacts with a new paradigm and lies another set of questions in examining how to remain operating on the social context of a particular region without being trapped by the centripetal force of the national identity? Do these lines belong merely to a conspiring ‘Turkish’ guy with the uncannily flag-like surname ‘Kosova’?

Engagement in Belgrade

The reason that somebody feels the need to engage in political art after all is then not so much a matter of art’s ability to change the world, but its ability to change itself in relation to the world, in its inability to exclude itself from the surrounding world, and, finally, in its desire to subvert and provoke the ideological mechanisms which threaten it. (Dimitrijević and Anđelković, 1997)

Until this point, I have tried to look at problematic social contexts in which even a contingent proximity to the representational scheme of national identity, intended or not, endangers the viability of a critical position. Within this framework, the process of identification is contrasted with its ‘outside’, a space for non-identification in regard to the idea of nation as the producer of belongingness. Yet, in some instances this process of non-identification is extended to the larger field of social engagement, so that any interest in social or political phenomena is ruled out from the start. But what would be the object of criticality, then, in that ‘interest-less’ space?

Art’s ideological release from the doctrine of socialistic realism has been accomplished in Yugoslavia in a relatively early phase. From the fifties on, this newly appropriated space of freedom from the ideologically imposed responsibility for social engagement was filled with the terms as ‘modernism’, ‘modernity’ and ‘modern’ that would promote notions as “progress, internationalism, cosmopolitanism and belief in the positive flow of history”. The escape from the local, national and traditional would paradoxically “fit in perfectly with the new imagery of the party bureaucracy [of the self-management socialism of Yugoslavia], which represented itself as the bearer of the new ideology of emancipation or modernity and progress”. (Blažević, 1999)

Against this moderate and ‘neutral’ ‘socialist aestheticism’, which “satisfied the new middle class taste” and kept the regime safe from social criticism, a new artistic ground has emerged in the aftermath of the global spirit of uprisings of 1968. In line with the neo-avant-garde movement that was changing the artistic paradigms in the West, this ‘radical modernism’ in Yugoslavia based itself on “a counter-culture that would integrate the utopian dimension of history/society with the artistic sphere” (Blažević, 1999) that would question the meaning and context of art along a general critique of the ruling system.

Yet, the escalation of tension in the country, which would lead to its final collapse, the successive traumas and civil wars didn’t find any enunciation on the artistic field. One decade long horror was received either by an ‘active escapism’ of the progressive elements of the scene (Vuković, 2001), a refashioning of the “politics of non-political art” through the terms of ‘Second Modernism’ or ‘Modernism after Postmodernism’ (Pejić, 1999a) within the mainstream, and by the conservative and official promotion of a Neo-Orthodoxist art based on anti-Western sentiments and essentialist politics of nationalism and religious identity.

Unions of artists, critics, curators and theoreticians abandoned the institutional territories and moved out into their parallel worlds, remaining, through a greater part of the last decade of the twentieth century, in a state of permanent internal exile, in a unique triple hoop of the lack of communicability, caused by their own refusal to participate in the reality that was forced upon them, then of the institutional blockade of art courses that were considered to be inadequate for the paradigm of the new establishment’s representation, as well as the blockade of state borders that referred to all forms of international cooperation … (Vuković, 2001)

What the thin layer of the bourgeoisie, the champions of the great game of psychological repression, especially identified with the never-lived ‘belle époque’ was the concept of culture, of Culture which in these ‘murky times’ was the only thing to remain depoliticised, non-partisan and above party politics, beautiful and autonomous, elevated and consoling. (Dimitrijević and Anđelković, 1997)

The edgy character of the radical modernism of the seventies was kept active only by the figure of Raša Todosijević through his “cynical comments to the identification processes used to establish the national ideology as well as to the slang of authenticity in local art” (Vuković, 2001) throughout the nineties. His lengthy series of installations under the title Gott liebt die Serben, initiated in 1989, was a persistent criticism of the collective myths prompted by the rising nationalist ideology in the disintegration phase of Yugoslavia. He has followed “a strategy of action through ambiguous slippage of meanings and ideological positions”
(Dimitrijević and Anđelković, 1997) by combining strong symbols (swastika, Yugoslavian flag, menorah) with everyday objects of politically suggestive quality (suitcases, bureau furniture, traditional Serbian meal, chairs); but beneath this ambiguity, he established a consistent and bitter ridiculisation of the totalitarian, racist and essentialist mind. The irony in the coupling of religious and nationalist rhetoric within the short title is enhanced by its germanisation. The series of Gott liebt die Serben remained for a while as one of the rare artistic expressions opening up potentialities for a re-politicisation, for an absolute rejection of identification, and a brave counter-stance to the various nationalisms dominating Serbia for a decade.

In parallel to the rising anger to the Milosević regime, culminating in the 88 days long demonstrations in 1996/97, the shells of the inner exile of the art scene in Belgrade started to crack up. As Stefan Vuković puts it, “the idea of a new reality that would not just stand parallel with the imposed one, but one that would openly compete with it, became paradigmatic only in the mid-nineties” (2001). One of the figures, who could combine this shift towards social engagement with an experimental formal approach was Milica Tomić. Her video installation XY Ungelöst (1997) takes its name from a German TV programme from the seventies in which some selected crimes that had remained unsolved were briefly reconstructed and the viewers were invited to reflect on the possible perpetrators. At the outset of Tomić’s project the content is geo-culturally situated in a double bind. The date that appears at the beginning and the end, 28 March 1989, refers both to the declaration of statehood of the Republic of Serbia through a new constitution; and to the political murder of 33 people from Albanian origin in Kosova, which happened at the very same day. On the two screens of the project the audience sees 33 extras (figures from the Belgrade art scene) enacting the people killed in the aforementioned and unresolved incident, figures falling on a snow covered ground and leaving traces on it and the single figure of a women (the artist herself) apparently in an emotional and physical tension. As the title of the work implies Tomić’s objective here is to bring in a fictive platform to exhibit the willingness and the intention to investigate crimes that remained unaccounted for until now –not perhaps effective on the incidents in the past, but potentially enforcing for the future in supporting the public opinion against the state-perpetrated violence which became a self-assured practice in the Milosević era. Moreover, the motivation of the artist here “is not to make this crime a ‘universal’ one (or to abstract it all the way to the level of an irresponsible generalisation), but to make it a specific one, and identify it as a real but typical case, that turns out to be a general rule”. (Dimitrijević and Anđelković, 1997)

Todosijević’s series of Gott liebt die Serben proposes a strategy of avoidance of a homogenising and essentialising construction of a national identity through pushing the mythological rhetoric of it to its extreme until it becomes dysfunctional. The counter-identification process in Gott liebt die Serben remains critically and subversively in the field of national identity. It runs a deconstruction of the process of identification with an essentialised and fixed ‘we’. In XY Ungelöst Tomić devises the process of identification; yet, not with the ‘we’ that the family or the collective identity we live in asks us to identify with, the ‘we’ that we supposedly share similar traits with, but in a symbolic gesture, with the ‘we’ that we are supposed to counter-identify with, with the ‘others’, through which the difference of our supposed collectivity is defined. XY Ungelöst steps affirmatively out of the fixed borders of the national identity, in order to display the similarity we shared with the ones posed as the other. Additionally, through the use of extras from the Belgrade art scene, different sorts of collectivity models short-circuiting the national identity is proposed here, as the art community, the city of Belgrade itself, and the urban with its cosmopolitan nature.

Another work of the artist, I am Milica Tomić (1998-99) carries this ‘stepping out’ gesture further. In the video we see the rotating figure of the artist, who utters in the first turn the sentence “I am Milica Tomić – I am a Serbian”. Yet in the following turns, this equation between her subjectivity and her attached national identity is disassembled by the following utterances “I am Milica Tomić – I am a Korean”, “I am Milica Tomić – I am a Norwegian” and so on. The repetition of the expression in various languages relativises and denaturalises the equation at the beginning and underlines the arbitrary character of the process of national identification. Another project Milica Tomić and Róza El-Hassan Driving in the Porsche and Thinking about the Overpopulation (2000), in which the two artists, El-Hassan and Milica Tomić wearing her partisan uniform, hint at other levels of identification that cut across the national one. The problematic implied in the title (the so-called overpopulation of Europe with non-Europeans) is linked through the figure of Jörg Haider at the steer wheel of the sports car, the ultra-nationalist Austrian politician with a heavy anti-immigrationist agenda, to the economic power asymmetries on the globe with cultural consequences.

The pluralistic dispersion of singular subjectivities into different forms of identifications, which, from the start, circumvent the fixation of individuals to essentialist monolithic identities, is also the determinant motif in Uroš Djurić’s Populist Project. The concept of ‘populism’ has been appropriated by the artist in an affirmative twist in order to emphasise the impossibility of a full-scale assimilation of the dynamic and amorphous organism called ‘the people’ by a political programme (Vukoviæ, 2003). As in Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht’s approach to the positive use of mass media in their early, anarchistically optimist phases, Djurić re-evaluates the emancipatory potential residing in the mass culture and phantasmatic mobility between popular representations. The football arenas, for instance, are being considered as one of the most prominent social spaces, which shapes the nationalistic enunciation mingled with misogyny and homophobia. Nevertheless, at the same time, they are the space of an unbound fantasy, in which people want to see spectacular, world-famous football players from foreign countries in the clubs they support; or similarly, young footballers dream of playing in the foreign leagues that are better than their local ones.

God Loves the Dreams of Serbian Artists, a series photographs with the frame of the Populist Project, exemplifies the personal fantasy exceeding the borders of the nation-state. By an ironic twist, the title of the series fractures the aggressively exclusionary and xenophobic rhetoric of nationalism that is referred to. While Todosijević’s strategic use of the slogan aimed at ridiculing the closure advocated by this sort of thinking, Djurić’s appropriation exploits the inner conflicts of it and marks the openings and potential circulations within the tainted field of football. In the pictures, we see Djuric posing on the pitch along the eleven players of some West European football teams, wearing the same full uniform as them. In some other photographs, he sides to a number of famous footballers at the corridors of hotel or stadiums and haves a quick snap shot with, as a proper fanatic of football as such. Another series in the project entitles as Celebrities is following the same idea, in which the artist himself is being pictured along prominent artists , famous movie stars, politicians and son on.

The third part of the Populist Project, as series of cover designs of a fictional publication called Hometown Boys and promoted as “The First Serbian Porn, Art & Society magazine, brings together various visual items taken from hardcore pornography, radical politics, football matches, street clashes, techno nights, rock concerts and current political events. Stevan Vukovic (2003) rightly sees in Djuric’s project a free space for individuation, deliberation and interpretation on representations on the popular field, yet Djurić’s work also runs through the collective nature of the urban; habits, myths and symbolic consumptions (vinyl records, local rock concerts, porn circulation, trips to other geographies and bringing back goods from those places, and so on), which made Belgrade the locus of resistance to Milosevic regime, and which still keeps it unique and at the same time cosmopolitan, connected to other urban textures on the rest of the globe.

Branko Dimitrijević (2002) is quite critical about this “invention” of urban culture of Belgrade which is portrayed “as something that is ‘good’ in itself … by the admirers of Serbian opposition movements, of the activities of Radio B92 and by all those who believed that there is such a thing as ‘the other Serbia’ visually manifest in rock’n’roll bands playing in smoky garages or ‘western-looking’ kids in gritty urban landscapes”. Dimitrejić’s objection to the ‘false’ dichotomy between the First Serbia, the one operated by the Milosević regime, and the Second/Other Serbia that resisted to it, seems to be based on the questionable political motivations of the latter, which pursued a covert mode of conservatism, inheriting elements from the anti-Titoist past, and which could not succeed to divorce itself from the ‘alternative’ nationalisms opposing the one in the government. In a parallel analysis, he also underlines the elitism, xenophobia and cultural racism surfacing occasionally among bourgeois segments of the urban. Yet, I would still insist on my investment in the concept of the urban, or at least in the progressive qualities of it as exemplified in the work of Uroš Djurić. Belongingness to the ideas that are less than a nation, such as a city, a neighbourhood, a football team, may accelerate the fragmentation of the contents of identification that is proffered or forced upon the subject and decentralise political power invested in them. The living in the bourg exceeds the values of the bourgeoisie.

Dimitrejić expressed his contention on the binary between the first and second Serbia in the context of Young Serbs (2001), the photograph series of the artist Phil Collins, which portrayed a number of young people from Belgrade. His review on the works detected a certain sense of narcissism reflected on the close-up shots of the faces of the portrayed figures, which he explained through an analysis based on the idea of a post-traumatic generation. This analysis triggered a succession of responses written by the portrayed people themselves. One of the crucial contention posed in these texts was about Dimitrijević’s phrase of ‘suspended adulthood’ which implied a distantiation of the young people in their twenties from the excessively laden political context of Serbia. As a ‘thirding’ element employed in bypassing the aforementioned dichotomy, it is not clear whether Dimitrejić discerns an emancipatory opening in it or a danger of apolitisation. Dušan Grlja, one of the contributors rightly observes that Dimitrejić’s appeal to the notion of ‘suspended adolescence’ aims to define a phenomenon specific to a geography and culture but ends up in portraying a global situation. So at the end, ‘the other Serbia’ becomes “a representation of the ‘globalized’ Serbia that takes part in ‘civilisational trends’’’ (Grlja, 2002). The contributors to this amazing discussion question the viability of an analysis based on the notion of generation, the (im)possibility of the construction of a ‘we’ and the need for a switch from the dysfunctional and in some cases apolitical mode of ‘protest’ (embodied as the Second Serbia) to a mode of engaged ‘criticism’.

România versus Non-Identitaire ?

In the second half of the sixties and later in the first couple of years of the seventies the restrictive grip of the state apparatus on the artistic production entered into a relatively relaxed atmosphere in comparison with the former two decades, which allowed a certain extent of re-‘synchronisation’ between the art productions in Romania and Western world. New art practices of a neo-avant-garde nature emerged in various central cities of the country, but due to economic difficulties and the lack of access to new visual technology this new experimentality remained rather within the frame of practices as happenings, performances and land-art. Yet, following the ideological hardening in the course of the seventies, these practices had to be realised in private spaces or on unpopulated sites, which stripped them from their constitutive part, the public. In order to distinguish these practices from the notions of happening and performance, Ileana Pintile (2002) names them as practices of ‘actionism’. The concept does signify the absence of communicability of these practices, but it also confer them a political tone. However politicality, the twin dynamic of conceptualisation in the recent art practice, was not enunciated in a manifest manner –it could not be. As Bojana Pejić (1999b) puts it, “in a fully politicised socialist society ruled by a Communist Party, any political art was seen as an ‘anti-Communist’ act”. The references to the social life were formulated through either universalised terms of humanism or spiritual terms of semi-religious sources. The topics were generally chosen from generic notions as birth, death, fertilisation, suffering and violence; the works were spatially situated mostly in open sites, and remained unspecified through social contexts; the signifiers of protestation were carried through carefully encoded symbolical acts, such as strategic passivity, destruction of the artwork, fire and to a certain degree, self-destructive gestures. “Any creation which [was] non-conformist charge[d] itself with political meaning, implicit or declared”, says Alexandra Titu (1997). Yet, as the Ceauşescu regime drifted to an increasingly irrational regime of paranoia and control, ‘declared’ references to the political life, iconography and representations of it, such as the cult figure of the leader or the flags of the nation or the party, remained scarce -of course, with some exceptions, as in some of the works of Ion Grigorescu, Paul Neagu and Teodor Graur, albeit “in a rather veiled and allusive form”. (Pintilie, 2002)

The 1989 revolution brought an immense opening in all senses; it also brought the “discovery of the social as a source for commentary” (Titu, 1997). It would be a difficult task to map out all the artists and works related to social and political thematisation and to place them in their specific contexts. The scenario I will offer here is surely a partial, personal and to a certain extent biased reading. But here it goes.

From 1991 onwards, Dan Perjovschi set out to produce drawings with political comments in alternative, oppositional publications such as Contrapunct and 22. The manifestly public character of his profession in these magazines slowly passed into his performances on the contemporary art field. In 1992, in a performance titled The Appropriation (of Land) Committee, Perjovschi sold fifty pieces of 6 x 8 cm portions of soil, symbolising land of Romania. The act was the indicator of a willingness to contribute to the transition phase from the remnants of the Ceauşescu regime to a democratic society. The fever for intensifying this process was illustrated by the symbolical re-privatisation of the land -which was collectivised by the previous regime, leading to terrible social and agricultural consequences. The performance did not suggest a wholesale privatisation towards the monopolist capitalism of an-ethical property speculation but rather a symbolically homogenised, humble re-distribution of possession and dignity. On the other hand, it also responded to its political context in which the newly defined nationalist paranoia conceived the process of land privatisation as a danger of intrusion of foreign elements (including the minorities within the country) and a threat to national integrity. The ‘sell-out’ in Perjovschi’s performance worked symbolically in favour of ‘the people’ but against the interests of ‘the nation’.

One year later, in a performance practiced in the frame of the festival Europe Zone East Perjovschi had his arm tattooed with the word ‘România’. Tattoo has been used as a tool of identification with certain cultural values. The inscribed skin becomes the site of inclusion and exclusion, a border between the social and the individual or the community s/he belongs to. It is widely used to signify identifications within minoritarian groups since the dominant majority does not need any additional marking to be exhibited on the social space. Minoritarian identities and subcultures use tattoo as an instrument for differentiation from the homogenous bulk of the masses and for facilitating the recognition phase between the members of these differentiated and marked communities. Perjovschi’s tattoo, on the other hand, rested on a tension. In order to irritate and displace the sterile and conformist quality of the contemporary art scene at that time, aesthetically and culturally (and tattoos were not that popular in Romania in this period), Perjovschi applied this technique of differentiation practiced by the groups as prisoners, gypsies or marine soldiers. Yet, the inscribed word on his arm was the signifier of the majoritorian belonging to a national identity. Can such a mode of identification be re-formulated as a minoritarian position? And if yes, against which higher identity? Here we face the second step of Perjovschi’s critique.

In contrast to the canons of happenings and performances that have reinstated “the traditional male role of the active subject” (Piotrowski, 2002), Perjovschi in that performance, is being exposed to an external act. He is sitting on a chair and extending his left arm and someone else is inscribing pigment onto his skin; the word Romania and the consequent representational branding are imposed onto an individual body by someone else. Is it the ‘master symbol’ of national identity imposed on him by the nationalist discourse of the Ceauşescu era? Or more accurately, by the more recent, re-invented “national history which [was] now being re-told without censorship” (Pejić, 1999b)? The ‘someone else’ referred here in this performance is perhaps Europe. In the political context at that time, Perjovschi let himself being “stamped as a cow” to indicate the objectivisation of any person living in Romania. This ironic passivity targets the power asymmetry between the West and the organic complexity, which it reduced into the single word of ‘România’. Yet, there is a hat on the first ‘a’ letter; a sign of indigenousness. In that case, can it be also a non-ironical identification with the country’s name –at least in front of the new Big Brother called Europe? But, what would we think of an artist from Belgrade, for example, who tattooed himself with the word ‘Serbia’ in the nineties, ironically or not?

Two years later, Perjovschi produced four montaged photographs, in which he, with his tattoo clearly visible on his arm, posed in front of some urban settings in Bucharest. The composition with a shabby hut used as a toilette in the open field was titled The Most Beautiful Country in the World. Another with a churched squeezed between two high buildings was called Always Between Two Empires. The one that depicts the infamous People’s House had the title A Tiny People with Such A Big House. The fourth composition that depicted a dozing old drunk sleeping in the public space was titled as Freedom Thirsty. We find here a bitter irony that displaces the boastful terminology of nationalism, but at the same time that retains an empathic link to and embeddedness in the geo-culture called Romania.

The extent of irony was more intensive in the projects of the art project SubREAL from the early nineties. The group was combining various stereotypes on being a Romanian in utterly subversive sarcasm, or in their words, in a “cynicism [operating as] an international trend in a nationalistic context”. They had two targets to displace: the rising nationalism and the negative exoticism of the European gaze in regard to Romania. Draculaland, for example, superimposed two historical images in a funny single composition. In the image we basically see the reproduction of the Mona Lisa of Leonardo; but the face of the figure is replaced by the hideous head of Vlad the Impaler. The displacing effect on looking something (or rather two things) familiar but in a completely uncanny fusion leads to mockery of both of what these images represent. A historical figure whose was recently re-honoured by the official authorities as one of the forerunners of national independence was put into a drag costume. On the other hand, one of the icons of aesthetic excellence of Western civilisation was transformed into a nightmarish appearance of Prince Dracula. The Western imagination that locates its fantasised monsters onto other (neighbouring) geographies, in that instance Bram Stroker’s novel, is being sabotaged by installing the nightmare back into the parts of that imagination that are considered to remain forever in harmony, beauty and order.

Another work of SubREAL, The Castle, is rich in its interconnected layers. The group was invited to an exhibition to be held in Ujazdowski Castle in Poland. And for that show the group decided to refer to the Jules Verne’s novel Le Château des Carpathes, which told the story of a noble living alone in his castle up on a hill and spying, through a complex set of strange auditory and optical devices, upon his subjects living down the hill. By constructing a miniature version of the People’s House, SubREAL made use of the connotation inherent in Verne’s novel that is easily extendable to ‘the Genius of the Carpatians’ who built a similarly paranoiac system of “Securitate”. A chair having long stakes instead of legs (another reference to Vlad the Impaler) was dangling on the miniature castle. Yet, more interestingly, the material they used for building up this replica was boxes of Carpaţi, the Romanian cigarettes that had became widely popular in the black markets in Poland during the eighties. Nationalist myths, myths on Romania fabricated by the colonialist conventions of the European literature, basic goods, versatile relations between the ex-socialist countries, antilegal commerce came together in a single rhizomatic composition.

The features employed in the SubREAL projects are mostly of representational character; and the humorous settings offered by the group between these elements point at the impossibility of getting beyond this representational level. There is no truth about a Romanian essence to discover. And there is no way to see the personal affiliations of the members of the group to the idea of Romania -except their personal pursuits of art production. Both of the members of the project, Călin Dan and Josif Kiraly have recently concentrated on contemporary the urban texture of Bucharest. Their photograph-based investigations on the city reveal willingness and an empathic attachment to record the current transitions in architecture, problems in urban planning, sociological dimensions of dwelling and so on. Josif Kiraly’s photograph series Re-constructions, compositions of multiple pictures shot in different times and slight varying perspectives allude also to the quest of attaining an integral meaning from the dizzying, fragmented experiences lived through the phase called ‘transition’.

It was impossible not to respond to the events of 1989. Yet what happened later? What was the art produced on, during the process of normalisation? In the frame of an exhibition they curated in France, Laurence Bosse and Hans Ulrich Obrist defined what they saw in Romania as “une scene postnationale et heterogene, emergente et nonidentitaire”. Post-national… “The shift from the local obsessions regarding national salvation to a desire for the fastest and most encompassing connection possible” (Balaci, 2003). It is perfectly understandable; but should the annexation to the global mean also a shift towards the post-political -deconnexion from the social?

The generation of my age, namely the people born in the first half of the seventies and lived the nineties in their twenties in a normalising Romania seem to have retreated from any interest in the social, if not from any critical art practice. Should we read it as a positive sign of being normalised, or more than that, of living in an attained normalcy? Is it about the gains of the previous generation that struggled to formulate the transition phase in a proper analysis? Is it about an optimist view about the contemporary Romania that says, it has already connected to the hyper-speed of global circulation of signifiers: cable television, MTV, internet, chic and sexy magazines from England? A ‘suspended adolescence’? The illusive cushion effect that was once produced by Soros foundation, a sense of safety and hope; and accession to EU on its way? Or just the opposite -pessimism about the future of the country, tiredness in waiting for the never coming normalcy in economic terms? To divert to other geographies or having already left the country. Starting some business or giving up any art production in the face of the seducing offers coming from the advertisement industry, broadcast companies, (graphic) design studios? Leaving the pitch empty?

Cosmin Gradinaru is an interesting name for understanding this generation in transition. In a series of photographs he visualised a traumatic event he experienced in his past. When he was only ten, he came across to an aborted foetus thrown out into the woods. More than facing a human being disallowed of life and falling into the midst of existential questions about life and death in an early age, Gradinaru was traumatised by the reaction of his mother who chastised him for reporting the found foetus to the local police. She knew that the authorities would trace the mother of the baby in order to persecute her bitterly. The force used to stick to the ideological regime on demographic targets of the nation had produced an unspoken but daily terror on the people. Gradinaru was perplexed about this discrepancy between what he was taught on behaving as a proper citizen and the teachings of his own mother. Thirteen years later when he came across to yet another disposed foetus he could not resist taking pictures of it. The haunting image of the previous one, a death inflicted by a so-called communism, re-surfaced –but this time in front of a setting prepared by another ideological regime. Normalisation accomplished, but not the normalcy.

In the description of another series of photographs depicting the steel recycling gypsies, Gradinaru wrote “First of all this series of photos is not about an exotic and backward Romania, it is about a nomad community that has kept its tradition alive over the years, despite all the social and political pressures during the communist period.” His resistance to a reception of his work that would reduce it into a national allegory is quite telling. For sure, it is primarily a shield used against the exotising gaze of the European, but it also illustrates the ways in which one can deal with the social without falling into the traps of thinking in the terms of the nation. The content of Gradinaru’s works is very atypical for his generation, but his ongoing distantiation from art production in favour of an entrepreneurship of subcultural fashion design seems to be symptomatic.

Young people in their early twenties are about to take the stage. They have already inherited the thematics of the previous generation: psychologism, the use of everyday life occurrences, depiction of the ‘misery of student life’, quotidian objects, subcultural iconography (hip-hop, graffiti, stencils). Yet, there is a recent vague but perceivable twist in approaching local or political issues, conceiving Romania as a whole and defining a common enunciative field, perhaps as a generation; the last one that will have the Ceauşescu disaster in its memory.

In a recent exhibition held in his private apartment flat Vlad Nanca brought together works that relate to the figures or figurations representative for the Romanian national life, such as the national product Dacia, the national poet Eminescu, the national artist Brancuşi and so on. The title of the exhibition is itself a clear declaration of situatedness: Vlad Nanca, Lives and Works in Bucharest (2003). On the humorous flier image we see a man on ground trying to repair a broken Dacia. One of works in the exhibition Original Adidas deals with daily suffering in the eighties in which finding and buying meat was quite difficult and the complementary parts of the animals that are bought instead were named by the general population ironically after luxurious goods to be found in the West. Thus, the flimsy claws if chicken were called ‘cutlery’, the pork head ‘computer’ and the meatless feet of the pork ‘adidas’. The latter anonymous metaphor is literalised here by Nanca through the three stripes of the famous brand placed onto a pork feet.

Another work in the exhibition illustrates the confusion between the continuities and ruptures of Romanian near past and future. The dizzying shift between the two, once warring ideological continents, the state-communism of Eastern Europe and liberal social democracy of Western Europe is being represented in that piece by two flags. One of the them bares the sickle and hammer combination used by the USSR and the other bares the circular twelve stars of the EU. Will the latter truly replace the former? Is the EU really the only viable alternative for Romania still trying to heal the traumas of its nightmarish past? Nanca’s sardonic swap between the colours of the two flags (blue & yellow USSR flag and red & yellow) points at that confusion among the Romanian minds -the split of the national tricolour into two trans-national entities.

The national tricolour of the Romanian flag has another signification in the city of Cluj. The fetishisation of it by the ultra-nationalist mayor of the city, furnishing the whole of the city centre with small flags, spreading it onto every kind of urban furniture (litter bins, benches, street posts, electricity posts, flowers in the parks) create a grotesque festivity of colour but also a frightening paranoiac space defined against the Hungarian population in the city and in Transylvania in general. Mircea Cantor and Ciprian Mureşan’ series of photographs titled New Species is a deconstructive mockery on this weird situation. We see both of the artists watering meticulously the coloured street posts. It is on one hand a parodic gesture for doubling the absurdity of the cityscape and on the other a ridicule of the nationalist attribution of ‘organic’ quality to inanimate things and representations.

The recent emergence of direct interest in the issues around social, national or local problems has been criticised of being conformist responses to the expectations of the Western art system that favours art practices of that kind. Not only in Romania, but in all peripheral cultures, the artists presenting ethnographic works on their local experience are being frequently accused of self-exotisation. Through that perspective, results of that sort of art practice exhibit a fake occupation on politicality and resume the ideological patronage of an external gaze.

Mircea Cantor’s piece Double Headed Matches has been examined in that context. At the outset of the project, Cantor planned to distribute boxes of specially designed double headed matches to the passers-by on the streets of Brussels. The concept of the project was cleverly linked to the Duchampian problematisation of authorship, pop-art conventions of commodity use, arte-povera’s appeal to cheap material and presentational techniques of relational aesthetics. For the production of the matches Cantor applied to a factory based near Cluj. The factory directors told him that they their machinery was technically not capable to produce the second head of the matches, but the workers in the factory could instead do the job with their own hands for the agreed payment. This interesting procedure was filmed by Cantor and later displayed along the initially planned performance. Later, though, during the last Venice Biennale the project was re-presented only by the video material. The truly interesting local context of the matches’ production somehow overshadowed the initial idea of Cantor, which was not based on this social specificity but on a series of art-historical references. Can social engagement, willingly or not, fall prey to other ideological agendas? Are we again over-contextualising things? Can we insist on a radical positioning in terms of politicality without being manipulated by a ‘foreign invention’? Who is the audience of that sort of work; and to whom do we tell ‘our stories’? Do these practices truly ‘work’ at home?

Instead of a Conclusion

At the end of this paper, which set out to speculate about the problematic ground between national identity and social engagement, between interest in and distance to the social problems, and about the different critical registers to the process of identification, I want to go back to the tattoo performance of Dan Perjovschi. In the frame of In den Schluchten des Balkan exhibition, the artist have received ten sessions of laser treatment for erasing the tattoo on his left arm. If we remember the original intentions invested in the first tattoo performance, we can perceive a symmetrical twist in methodology. It was aimed to be a symbolical repetition of the European branding of the people of a country with a single word. It had irony –it said something and it meant the opposite. In the second instance, however, the irony disappears: the branding is this time straightforwardly denied –in an exhibition that could not completely escape the representational categorisation of a geography.

Another interesting aspect about the laser treatment is the fact that it actually doesn’t get the pigment out of the skin. It rather dissolves and spreads it onto the texture of it. So, the word ROMÂNIA is not to be read as a whole anymore, but it stays somewhere in the body; it is stripped out of its political power on the body of its bearer but kept somewhere inside and aside. A perfect example of disidentification…



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